UX 2018: Year End Roundup of the Best Articles

Catch up on 1 year of UX reads in 1 hour.

I’ve done the work of going through this year’s UX roundup articles and “best of” UX lists so you don’t have to. These are my hand-selected 8 round up lists, including highlights of my favorites from each one.

“There hasn’t been a ground-breaking technology that has made designers stop in their tracks. There hasn’t been a game changer of any kind. Partially because tech hasn’t advanced enough to create disruption. Partially because we’ve had more important issues to attend to.”

I constantly reference Nielsen Norman Group (“NN/g”) because they’re at the forefront of developing the UX field as we know it today.

This year I noticed NN/g put out a lot more video content, and they curated their top 10 with the most views.

My personal pick from this list is 10 UX Challenges for the Next 25 Years. It runs 30 minutes and covers Jakob Nielsen’s predictions of how UX roles will evolve – and the types of world challenges that UX will help solve.

The first half of the article is about Baymard’s new and upcoming reports – you can skip to their 10 most popular articles.

My favorite learning came from the research that sites should offer delayed account creation after the guest checkout experience, because 37% of users will abandon a checkout due to being forced to create an account.

As an avid Google user (this company seriously runs my life), I was curious about what the tech giant itself considered noteworthy in their design efforts. Not to mention that Google was awarded FastCo’s Design Company of the Year.

Of the 10 design accomplishments curated by the big G, Google Lens was the product I wish I knew about. It’s an app that leverages AI to help identify information about photos users take – wish I had this to identify plants when I was visiting National Parks!